Sunday, December 11, 2011

In my previous post, I went through my thoughts on rap albums from this year that did not make it into my top 5. All artists included in the previous post were devastated, I'm told. Now is the time, however, to talk about my five favorite albums. Note that the operative term here is "favorite." My music listening is more or less restricted to the mainstream and its peripheries these days. I don't have the time or desire to get into the myriad underground artists, rap or otherwise, who are making creative waves. Sure, there might be some crazy wild indie stuff out there that blows these five out of the water. But like they say...if an indie artist records a song in his mom's basement, and no one is there to hear it, did he really record a song?

Also, I'm not doing the whole "rank the albums from 1-5 thing." There isn't one album that stands out as my favorite this year (last year, the Roots How I Got Over was far and away my favorite). Thus the albums below, in no particular order, are simply the five that I liked and listened to the most.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Now that the final month of 2011 is upon us, the time is ripe for looking back at the year's best hip hop albums. Among my circle of friends, I'm mostly alone in my love for the genre. That probably has something to do with running in a middle-class, suburban Nebraska crowd and being a part of the generation that lived just before hip hop became a suburban, sweater-wearing affair (thanks for that, Kanye). Since I don't get a chance to discuss the beats and lyrics of the best albums throughout the year, I'm going to dump all my hip hop thoughts here. This will be the first of two entries. In this post, I'll talk about the rap albums I've listened to enough to form an opinion about, but which ultimately did not make my top 5 list. In the next post, I'll discuss my five favorite rap albums from the past year. But first, a brief background note: